Princella Seripenah

MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST & DESIGNER
DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION · HAND EMBROIDERY
TEXTILE PORTRAITURE · SURFACE PATTERN DESIGN

“Her work centres on states of calm, serenity, and rest — rendered in earthy organic palettes, with black women as her muse.”

THE ARTIST

Princella Seripenah Thompson is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and medical researcher based in Nottingham, UK. She draws what she’d like herself and others to feel. And in the process of creating those peaceful subjects, she too finds peace.

Her textile work is rooted in her West African heritage, where art is told through fabrics such as kente, adire, bogolan. She is self-taught, and the slow process of her medium has become its own kind of rest.

Princella simultaneously leads research in AI-enabled medical education at the University of Nottingham, working to make how doctors are trained more equitable and more effective.

THE PRACTICE

Princella came to art through a persistent need to express what words could not. While training as a medical doctor, she was drawing on her iPad most evenings, leading creative teams at church, finding ways to keep making regardless of where she was or what else she was carrying. That practice never stopped. It grew.

Her digital work is where her visual language first took shape, and where it continues to live most publicly. Book covers, editorial illustration, surface patterns, brand collaborations. A precise, expressive visual language that is immediately recognisable as hers: warm palettes, figures at rest, a quality of stillness that feels intentional. She built that language over years of making in the margins of a demanding life, and it became the foundation everything else grew from.

The textile work came from that same foundation, but turned inward. Back to heritage, back to fabric. Most West African art is told through cloth — kente, adire, bogolan. Textiles are how identity is marked, how stories are passed on. Picking up thread felt like a truer reflection of who she is and where she comes from, and she built an entirely self-taught body of work in textile portraiture that stands on its own terms.

Both practices are rooted in the same instinct: to make images that feel like rest. And That is what she brings to every commission.

SELECTED WORK